Just came across this wonderful strip on the xkcd website and I felt like I had to share it (click on the image to go to the full-size original version):

For more information on the voting machine debacle in the US, I recommend Hacking Democracy (an HBO documentary) and the Voting category on Freedom to Tinker (a blog started by Ed Felten).

This one is very interesting and comes from Christopher Blizzard who has been developing the site as a personal project alongside his day job as an open source evangelist at Mozilla Corporation.

whoisi.com is a radically new concept and for that reason it can only be explained by reference to other concepts. The site is a very powerful alternative to services provided by the likes of Facebook and similar social networks such as following people’s online activities. The wonderful thing is that it does not require you to register or be a member, so it has no aspirations to spread itself through mandatory registration to provide the service.

The service is also a kind of Wikipedia for people. Anyone can add people, edit their aliases and add URLs related to them. Thus, you quickly get a very broad amount of information about the person and his/her activities.

We recently had a project where there was a need to automatically collect email addresses over the phone. I am sure everybody can appreciate how hard that is. To begin with, the user cannot enter her email address using the keypad on the phone. On top of that, even if you integrate a Speech Recognition engine, it is almost impossible to exactly capture the email address that the user has spoken. This is already very hard when dealing with a human on the other side of a phone conversation. I am sure you already had the experience where you had to communicate your email address to someone over the phone and found it almost impossible to convey it properly.

The problem stems from two distinct causes, in my opinion: